Poverty and Environment : Understanding Linkages at the Household Level

This report seeks to present micro
evidence on how environmental changes affect poor
households. It focuses primarily on environmental resources
that are outside the private sphere, particularly commonly
held and managed resources such as forests, fisheries, and
wildlife. The objectives for this volume are three-fold. It
is first interested in using an empirical data-driven
approach to examine the dependence of the poor on natural
resources. The second objective is to examine the role of
the environment in determining health outcomes. A third area
of interest concerns the role of policy instruments and
reforms. This report uses general economics literature as
well as data collected by the World Bank and its partners to
analyze poverty-environment linkages at the household level.
Poverty-environment linkages are inherently dynamic and
involve behavioral responses that make the identification of
cause and effect difficult. Thus, questions related to these
linkages are ideally answered with the use of panel datasets
or with data from randomized experiments.